The Soul of a Pilgrim

Video Transcript

David Whyte: Speaking of being yourself, I always remember you can take the monk out of Austria, but you can’t take the Austria out of the monk. [laughter] So in the Irish countryside, there were bits of — you know, the Celts not being the tidiest nation in the world — there’d be bits of paper blowing around everywhere. So Br. David took to going on a walk every day with a huge plastic bag, and by the end of it, the thing would just be full as he tidied up the whole Irish countryside as he went along. [laughter] And, because he just couldn’t help himself.

Br. David: I found this a wonderful way of showing myself grateful to Mother Nature by cleaning her up a little bit.

David Whyte: Exactly.

Br. David: I do this wherever I go and it’s really wonderful.

David Whyte: But I’ve always seen… I mean, one of the great qualities I’ve always felt about Br. David is the sense of a pilgrim soul and someone who’s got tremendous hospitality, both inside him but also for others. And a sense of absolute simplicity at the same time. And the sense that no matter what the circumstances would be, whether it’s sunny and clear or stormy and difficult, or whether he’s on a mountainside in Ireland or in O’Hare Airport, you know, with all the places canceled around him, there’s a man who’s standing on a certain kind of holy ground, which all of us also want for ourselves. So I often think of you as a great invitation to that ground.

Br. David: Thank you, David. But that again brings us back to pilgrimage. Because the difference between a journey and a pilgrimage is that in a journey, if you don’t get to your goal, you have not really made that journey. But on the pilgrimage, every step is the goal. And the next step is the goal. It’s the step by step that is the goal. And there’s a wonderful story by Tolstoy, one of his folk tales of two pilgrims, and they set out together and then they lose one another. And one gets to Jerusalem where they were going together, two Russian pilgrims. And the one who gets to Jerusalem sees the other one always way ahead of him, always in the best places, right where the celebration is going on. And then he loses sight of him again. And then his money runs out, he has to go home, he is never caught up with the other one, only seen him from afar. And when he gets home to his village he says, oh, you are home now, before I got home, and I saw you always in these other wonderful places in Jerusalem. And the other one is very humble and says oh, I have to confess, I never really got to Jerusalem. When we stopped at this one place I went into a house to fill my water bottle and I saw all these sick children, and the parents were sick, and they were starving to death, and I stayed with them, and I helped them a little, and I helped them a little more. And finally my money ran out and I had to go home. And in the end, one is wondering who really got to the goal. The one who responded to the situation. And that’s what gratefulness does with you. It makes you respond to this moment.